Just this morning (Tuesday, April 22, 2022), in the New York Times' "the Morning" online report, a guy named David Leonhardt writes with apparent amazement that "Coronavirus cases have risen in major cities.  Hospitalizations have not."  Imagine that.

Leonhardt goes on to note that despite the long list of members of Congress and other public servants recently diagnosed with COVID-19, none of them, even our superannuated speaker of the House, appears to have got very sick from it.  To his credit, he supplements this observation with some charts that clearly show the disconnect between current cases (which are rising) and hospitalizations (which remain flat).

So far, so good.  But then he gives his explanation for this trend.  That's where the spin and outright dishonesty of the COVID-forever left — led by the Times — continue apace.

To what does David the Lionhearted, the Gray Lady's intrepid knight of the keyboard du jour, attribute these positive trends?  He reports what (supposedly) "many experts believe":

• Vaccines and booster shots are effective and universally available to Americans who are at least 12. (Covid [sic] continues to be overwhelmingly mild among children).
• Treatments — like Evusheld for the immunocompromised and Paxlovid for vulnerable people who get infected — are increasingly available.
• Tens of millions of Americans have already been infected with the virus, providing them with at least some immunity.

Two key points should be drawn from this list of explanations.

First, an absolutely central reason for the good news about COVID-19 has been deliberately omitted.  Second, several systematic lies are embedded in the three explanations that are given.

As any truly knowledgeable and honest doctor or virologist — provided you can find one these days — will tell you, viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 mutate like crazy and evolve rapidly and in a predictable manner.  In short, these viruses consistently mutate to become more transmissible and less virulent.  Why do they evolve in this way?  For the same reason all organisms evolve: to benefit their own propagation and survival.

When a new virus is first introduced to a host species, the initial interaction is often not pretty.  The virus may struggle to spread between individuals, endangering its survival, and it may invoke severe illness in its host, even killing it, thereby endangering both species' survival.

Moving slowly and painstakingly from one home to another, while burning down the one in which you currently reside, is no way to survive.  So the virus mutates and evolves into a milder form that spreads more readily yet sickens the host less.

In essence, the perfect respiratory virus is the common cold.  It infects its host but makes the host sick enough only to sneeze the virus's progeny at everyone around.  It spreads like wildfire, but it doesn't burn down its own house in the process.

Not for nothing, but what do the other coronaviruses in general circulation among humans cause?  That's right: symptoms of the common cold.  This is almost certainly the final common pathway for SARS-CoV-2.

As a practicing physician, trained before schools of public health veered to the left of gender studies departments, I have been saying this since the summer of 2020.

Meanwhile, panic pornographers ranging from Anthony Fauci to Times newsboy Leonhardt's "experts" have latched onto that first trait of viral evolution (increased transmissibility) while deliberately downplaying, or even denying the second (reduced virulence).  Why?  Because they want to foment all the fear that increased transmissibility promotes, yet allow none of the hope and perspective about the virus that acknowledging reduced virulence would bring.

The second lesson to take from Leonhardt's list is this: as the facts become too obvious to support their false narrative, leftists perform the propagandistic equivalent of a "tactical retreat," covering their tracks with false and misleading explanations.

Leonhardt writes that "vaccines are effective and readily available."  Effective at what?  At stopping the virus in its tracks, as the Times and Fauci claimed for months?  Nope.  At preventing persons from contracting COVID-19, as they also claimed?  Well, obviously not, since every one of those politicians has been vaccinated and boosted to the hilt.  At reducing severity of disease?  Well, then what happened to the vaunted "pandemic of the unvaccinated"?  Based on the data curves Leonhardt provides, the unvaccinated aren't going to the ICU these days, either.

Leonhardt touts Evusheld and Paxlovid as "increasingly available," a total non sequitur in the absence of any data supporting their role in the current trends, which he does not provide.  He completely ignores any cheap, repurposed early treatments, despite — or more likely because of — the growing mountains of data supporting their effectiveness.

Finally, Leonhardt blatantly understates the effect of natural immunity, both by lowballing the number of previously infected Americans (it's in the hundreds of millions, Dave, not tens) and by the deeply misleading statement that prior infection produces "at least some immunity"  (Natural immunity is far superior to vaccine-related immunity.)

Here is the reality, the plain fact that Fauci and Leonhardt's "many experts" will never admit: SARS-CoV-2 is evolving and adapting to coexist with us.  The COVID-forever left remains as toxic and destructive as ever.

Image: qimono via Pixabay, Pixabay License.